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The panic is settling down, the whine of worry is receding to a steady hum in the back of my head, and several recovery plans are forming...
I lost my index page entirely, due to lazy keyword stuffing. My fault! Unfortunately, mine is a very small business: no listing = no food (let alone xmas).
I was planning on overhauling the website anyway, and I've given myself until 1/1/04 before I accept an opening with another business and abandon my own. The question now is: overhaul the index page and resubmit to Google immediately, overhaul the entire website and resubmit the whole thing in a few weeks, overhaul the website (starting with the index page of course) and wait for Googlebot. Time is most definitely a factor.
...are any of these plans likely to restore my index page to the directory before I have to throw in the towel in January?
There are also longer range options of starting over with a new website and closing the old.
Mahalo Nui Loa! (Thank you very much!)
Can somebosy else verify this, just in case its not me making a very silly mistake. Thanks, Robert.
Used the [webmasterworld.com...] tool and did a range of searches.....
What a mess. On some big terms e.g. rugby or football, the difference in results is 3 million between www. and www-ex or ww3.
Madness. Just give me back the nice gentle updates for consistency!
We have been in the Google index for more than 3 years and there have never been any problems. We are experiencing a very specific problem since Saturday afternoon (15 nov).
I have read about a lot of pages (and index pages) disappearing from Google during this latest update without any obvious reason. One of our 170 indexed pages suddenly fell from being on the first page in the serps to nowhere-to-be-found. All other pages are basically unaffected.
Some info about this specific page:
* PR still between 5-6
* No changes made to that page for the last 3 months
* A lot of relevant links from other sites
* A cached version of the page is in the Google index
* The page is in Google directory and Dmoz
* The page is fully indexed and searchable (but not for the relevant keywords)
I did some research and found a strange thing:
A site is linking to us and the link itself has been indexed under the domain TheSiteLinkingToUs.org. The link from that site looks like this:
http:// TheSiteLinkingToUs.org/resources/follow/1234
When I did a search on Google for that link I found that the link ITSELF has been indexed with the content from our site. We have no relation with that site whatsoever.
Are we being penalized for something that is out of our hands (like double content from the indexed link from the other site)? If that were the case, then a lot of other sites would also be affected.
Has anybody experienced something similar?
Feedback would be greatly appreciated.
I have sent an email to webmaster[AT]google.com a few days ago, but no response so far.
The update certainly isn't over. I survived Florida and stayed in exactly the same position throughout, but when I checked this morning - my site and my competitor's site - gone! (well, not exactly gone, prob. on page XXX, I didn't even bother to check)
Exactly the same thing happened to us. Our site that has been an authority site since 1995 called regionalarea.com was missing for the search term regional area this morning where we have been #2 for a long time.
After panicking and not finding this thread open I posted to a data centers thread. About an hour later we were back better than ever.
I just checked again as I write this and we are gone again.
There are sites with no relevency in high rankings that have never been there before and when you look at the content don't deserve to be there. Susy's vacation pics don't belong in the top 20 of 200,000 returned sites.
All I can do is be patient and hope that Google will straighten out. They are obviously working on it when you see the fluctuations that have been going on today.
I've changed our AdWord program around for this site until everything works itself out.
Sorry about the use of the word "related" could be misunderstood this is what it should say:
Anyway this thread is about the new search algo, to me it looks like really unrelated results, as the message indicate google now search for the keyword
you enter but also search for variations , like if you search for "Serviced
Office" google will search for Service office - Service offices - Serviced
office - Serviced offices - Services office - Services offices - and then
mix the results and sort them by PR. The problem here is that "Services" is
not the same as "Serviced" and "Serviced Office" means 1 thing when the 2
keywords are combined.
ALSO: It looks like all the results on -va that use this new 'variations' thing and show the "message", is also the results on google the have problems,( at least for my keywords) i think there is a bug in google software caused by this, could it be that "some" of the new software is in google but not activated and when you perform a search that trigger the new "variations" thing then google "forget" to sort the results and show them directly?.
Try this search on -va "serviced office new york"
Then go back the www.google.com and make the same search, this is the results we was dropped from , and the results looks totally unsorted.
Would this mean that we should pay attention to -VA for predictions on what it'll all look like once this debacle has run it's cycle?
In our niche this morning the SERPs are schizophrenic. A couple of longstanding, high quality sites followed by a "no longer in business" page, followed by a private forum (Yep, you can't even view the posts without signing up), and then a couple more quality sites, then news stories from obscure small town papers, followed by a couple amazon pages, then some directory listings and a classified ad page, etc.
Just bizarre stuff. Rankings are in no way related to PR, anchor text, title text, or in many cases, text on the page itself.
A couple of the offtopic pages are in fact from the hub of a large linkfarm, so there is a large number of outbound links with good anchor text. Authority site? Not hardly.
Still trying to make sense of it all The broad match theory is the most coherent I have seen so far.
WBF
-VA seems to be the only datacenter who's results seem plausable
I concur. -va were the results I was seeing on www earlier today but they have now reverted to the mess.
Wait and see!
Bek
Interesting theory. Just searched "serviced office new york" on www-va. How many of the returned listings would you say were relevant to the searced term? I can only see one out of the first 20 listings. This is probably a tough phrase though.
http://www.domain.com works for the toolbar, http://www.domain.com/ often returns a graybar
As of this morning, nothing in my categories even remotely makes sense. Old data...even more of my competitors gone (like I care, but seems to affect new sites added some time this year)...old Google directory back...
Is there a reason why these algo updates cannot be done "off line" and when its ready for prime-time, just export to the data centers? I am sure the update process is far more complicated than appears, but honestly, why does the end-user have to see this mess for nearly one week after the change is initiated?
I tend to agree to you especially because the -va index is much fresher that the others. There are pages in which I created yesterday in the morning and which are not present in the other dc's as well as updated backlinks.
What makes me a bit 'confused' is, that backlinks are updated but that this update seems not to influence the ranking. None of my pages has moved up or down although one pretty new niche page has now the double number of backlinks than the #1-site for that keyword has.
Thus it seems either updated backlinks do not influence rankings yet or the anchortext-factor has been downgraded very very much.
greg
My little backwater of interest is <noun> and <same-noun-plural>. Perhaps one or two of the top ten results for each swapped positions during the update, otherwise I can see no change. Google continues to treat plural differently here, as there is no intersection between the top 10 of each word.
As I continue to create content for <noun>, I do research every day with Google. I have noticed no sudden drop in relevancy. In fact, I often do not bookmark sites of interest, but count on being able to locate them again easily by using the same search terms as before.
If you examine the returns on Wednesday (prior to yesterdays returns) and compare with yesterday, it is fairly clear that the weighting of vanilla authority sites was increased.
The inevitable result: yet another general climb for those only semi-relevant deep pages from the vanilla sites, at the expense of focused sites. Hence the further deterioration of quality which most people have observed.
The -va center seems to have the weighting back to where it was prior to Wednesday.
It will be interesting to see whether that center percolates out... or whether it is overwhelmed by the others. Pity they didn't wind the weighting back to where it was last Friday!
I see the same things there as what people are saying here. I even recognized a few names saying the same "sky is falling" things about the Florida update as they did about the Dom/Esm updates! Didn't you guys learn the first time around?
Here is a link to a thread that has some valuable information from GoogleGuy that applies even to the Florida update and every update that Google ever has:
[webmasterworld.com...]
The most important thing in this thread IMO, posted on May 14th, 2003:
GoogleGuy:I would say more than days, less than months. That's just my personal take. A lot of people are paying attention to every microdetail at this point. I would say that stepping back a level of detail would give better insight and less stress. Suppose you're on a long bus trip. If you scrutinize the road for every bump, pebble, or sharp turn, you're going to be more stressed than you need to be.
If people are newer to WebmasterWorld, I'd recommend going back to last September, when we improved our scoring. If you re-read those threads, you'll see the same sorts of reactions that you see now. People claimed the sky was falling. You saw 5-10 people making pretty alarmist claims as loudly as possible. People suggested that scoring changes were a secret attempt to boost AdWords sales. The imminent destruction of Google was predicted several times. A few personal attacks on GoogleGuy took place. :)
I'm looking forward to doing a similar post for our next major improvement, whenever that comes: "You know, if you go back to May, you'll see several webmasters were worried about that change too. Would you believe that there were over 4000+ posts from people who were anxious about that change? ..."
[edited by: synergy at 5:34 pm (utc) on Nov. 21, 2003]
I agree about -va it is pre- yesterday, all sites are in the same order, as we had the front pages listed for reference.
Maybe Google is listening.
